ignorance

THIS Is CNN. How Embarrassing…For You, Me, Ted Turner, James Madison, Gutenberg, Australopithecus, Everyone

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

I watched this jaw-dropping exchange this morning on CNN’s New Day, unable to process what I was seeing. An alleged debate between two evidently paid CNN commentators, moderated by Alisyn Camerota, supposedly a professional broadcaster, the exchange was neither enlightening, informed or vaguely like anything the Founders could have recognized as “the press.” The level of logic and expression has been exceeded on multiple Jerry Springer episodes. The Kardashians could top it.. on a lucid day. Throughout the interminable segment, the “moderator” made no effort to control the rhetoric, correct screamingly obvious errors,or insist on decorum.

I think the best approach is to have you read it, if you can. When the transcript became available, I realized that what I had seen was even worse than I thought at the time. I was going to challenge you to pick out the most idiotic statements, but that’s too easy: closing your eyes and pointing at the screen would work. Here’s a more worthy test: see if you can identify an intelligent statement, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a bar debate between a soused kindergarten teaching assistant and truck driver recovering from a closed head injury.

But first,a word about Ana Navarro. When CNN started using her as its token conservative in studio panel discussions, I assumed it was one more example of the mainstream media stacking the deck to ensure that the liberal message prevailed by finding the lamest conservatives possible. She’s wishy-washy, inarticulate, and smug. Then Trump was nominated, and CNN found it had a Trump-hating Republican representing the Right on every issue: perfect! Navarro doesn’t even try to hide her hatred of Trump—the CNN anchors don’t try very hard, but they do a better job than Anna.

On the other hand, she not a persuasive advocate for anything, and ridiculous more often than not. As you shall see:

7:38 a.m. ET

BEN FERGUSON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: You have a right to do a lot of things in this country, and there are consequences, and the NFL got it wrong. The NFL got out and tried to play both sides of this issue. And then they tried to say, “Oh, we’re America’s team, we’re America’s game, we’re America’s sport,” while allowing their employees to disrespect this country. You have the right to do it — there’s consequences. The NFL boycott is real —

ALISYN CAMEROTA: Listen, I just want to be very clear. They say they’re not disrespecting the country. They say that their protest is about the treatment —

FERGUSON: Well, that’s what they say.

CAMEROTA: They’re the sources. They’re doing the protesting. They’re the protesters.

FERGUSON: I have the right to disagree with them. I’ll say this. I think many of the NFL players are frauds. Most of them did not go and vote in the last election, including Colin Kaepernick who’s never voted in an election — while coming out and claiming —

ANA NAVARRO, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Voting is not a requirement to protest. Voting is not a requirement to voice a political opinion.

FERGUSON: If you’re going to be the leader of a political statement, as Colin Kaepernick was —

NAVARRO: Donald Trump’s children didn’t vote, and they are advisors in the White House!

FERGUSON: And I criticized — and I criticized them for that. I’m consistent.

NAVARRO: Well, fine, you criticize them for everything, but don’t tell me, then, that they don’t have a right to protest when the senior advisors in the White House didn’t vote.

FERGUSON: Colin Kaepernick comes out and says, “I’m going to lead this group.” When was the last time he went to a Black Lives Matter — the guy saw a bunch of TVs and a bunch of cameras and said, “I’m going to kneel right now, but I’m not going to back it up.”

CAMEROTA: That’s his right.

FERGUSON: He has a right, but it also means you’re a fraud.

NAVARRO: Can I tell you something, Ben? Ben, how white of you to think that going to a Black Lives Matter rally —

FERGUSON: It’s not white — don’t even go there. Don’t even — I’m sorry — that’s absurd.

NAVARRO: No, no, who are you to tell a black person what makes them black — what makes them have black credible?

FERGUSON: Again, it has nothing to do with race.

NAVARRO: Look at yourself in the mirror. What he is saying might be more significant than what — than going to one of the rallies.

FERGUSON: If I go out there every day and I champion a cause and I never do it in real life, I’m a fraud.

NAVARRO: Who died and made you the judge of blackness — to tell Colin what’s’-his-name that the fact he voted or not allows him to have a political opinion?

FERGUSON: If you go out there every day and you fight for something that you say is so near and dear to your heart, and then I find out in reality you’re never involved in the issue other than being on national TV, you’re a fraud. You’re a fraud and a fake.

NAVARRO: Well, then talk to Ivanka Trump! Talk to Ivanka Trump who didn’t vote!

FERGUSON: Again, we’re talking about Colin Kaepernick.

NAVARRO: No, no, because you want to hold this one standard for this one set of people and another one for another set of people.

FERGUSON: I did. I said this. I said this. You should have voted in an election.

NAVARRO: Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are frauds because they didn’t vote in the Republican primaries!

FERGUSON: They should have voted in elections. I said that. You also voted for Hillary Clinton, and you say you’re a Republican, so that’s a little bit of a fraud, isn’t it?

NAVARRO: No, no, no, there’s a lot of Republicans who did.

FERGUSON: By using your standard. You come on here and say you’re a Republican. You say you’re a Republican, and you voted for Hillary Clinton. So you’re not a Republican, by your standard.

NAVARRO: You voted for a man who was a Democrat and then an independent, and then when he was an opportunist, he became a Republican. So, really, don’t go there for me because I have been supporting Republican candidates for President probably when you were still in diapers!

FERGUSON: Again, you voted for Hillary Clinton, and you say you’re a Republican.

NAVARRO: I voted for Hillary Clinton because I refuse to vote for a racist, misogynist, even though he was a Republican nominee.

FERGUSON: And you have every right to do that.

NAVARRO: And it was the first time in my life that I did not support the Republican nominee because I found him absolutely disgusting, and I was going to put country over party! And you are nobody to question Colin Kaepernick what’s-his-name’s blackness or my Republican credentials, okay? You are not judge and or jury! You can do whatever you want for yourself — you cannot judge me — you cannot judge whether he is black enough!

FERGUSON: I can judge Colin Kaepernick. It doesn’t have anything to do with his blackness. This the weakest argument — let me finish, though —

NAVARRO: Oh, you’re saying — you’re saying he’s not black enough because he didn’t go to Black Lives Matter.

FERGUSON: Again, I’m going to finish my point here because it’s really important.

NAVARRO: And you are black because you went to a Black Lives Matter rally!

FERGUSON: Let me finish – let me finish — again, let me finish. Colin Kaepernick coming out and saying this is a big issue to him, but he never goes out into the community and is involved in it — doesn’t even care enough about the issue which he says everyone else should care about to go register to vote and vote. That is hypocrisy — it has nothing to do with being black or white. It’s called being a hypocrite.

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The NAACP. A Really Bad One…

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

The NAACP, once a heroic and invaluable champion of civil rights, has apparently completed its devolution into a hyper-partisan, race-baiting collection of venal, divisive  hacks. It has been said that every cause inevitably becomes a racket, and the NAACP is now a prime and tragic example.

How do we know this? We know this because the organization has called the decision (finally) by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to command his player to stick to what they are paid for—football and only football—when they are on the playing field, and to stand for the National Anthem “a public commitment by an NFL owner to violate his players’ Constitutional right to free speech.”

This is more than merely ignorant, though if genuine the statement would be unforgivably ignorant for a civil rights organization: a civil rights organization that doesn’t know what civil rights are and what the Bill of Rights means is useless as well as without credibility.

That, however, is impossible. The NAACP has lawyers; their lawyers aren’t idiots. They know that the First Amendment has no relevance or connection to the silly NFL players’ kneeling stunt during the National Anthem. The lawyers had to have informed the NAACP leadership of this, as if that was necessary, which it almost certainly was not. The leadership has to know better than to make this junior high school level civics mistake. No, in this case the NAACP is lying. It is deliberately misinforming the people who depend on it to lead on civil rights, and who trust the organization to be able to support its position with facts and law. It is doing this to inflame passions and worsen the racial divide. What other reason could there be? Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/5/2017: Stupid Quotes Edition…Plus “Catalexit”

/ Jack Marshall / 53 Comments

Good Morning!

1 The Las Vegas Strip massacre has triggered so many dumb and unethical quotes flying around on social media and out of the mouths of elected officials that it’s hard to keep up: any of them could sustain a full post.

  • Here’s one from Gloria Steinem, quoted approvingly by a feminist Facebook friend:

“How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion — mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he’s about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because). Let’s close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun.It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care, right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?”

Wow.

First, we learn that no matter what the human tragedy, all some activist can think of is how it can further their own single issue obsession. With Gloria, that single issue abortion, even though there are no helpful or intellectually honest comparisons to be made between guns and abortions. Second, we learn that Gloria never grasped the old “two wrongs don’t make a right” concept.  The various abortion-blocking measures she alludes to are all unethical and unconstitutional interference with a Constitutionally protected right, but she would joyfully inflict them on citizens trying to exercise their rights, because she doesn’t care about those.

  • This one is more surprising and depressing: Matthew Dowd, a regular on ABC’s Sunday morning round-tables with George Stephanopoulos,  meaning that he is presented as competent, historically informed, and trustworthy, actually tweeted,

“2nd amendment was all about having a militia available to protect the government from threat foreign or domestic w/out a standing army.”

This is not just wrong, but spectacularly and inexcusably wrong. Dowd is either lying, ignorant, or unable to process information. His nonsense has been used by anti-gun fanatics for decades, but the Supreme Court and the vast majority of Constitutional scholars reject it, concluding that the Bill of Rights, which all focus on individual rights that cannot be taken away by the government, would not include as #2 provision endorsing militias and nothing more.

The tweet should disqualify him from commenting on any gun policy issues from now until the stars turn cold.

  • I decided that Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) has already been exposed enough on Ethics Alarms this year (as a result of his unethical and divisive boycott of President Trump’s inauguration) that I don’t need to hand him another Ethics Dunce, but this rant delivered during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” (which network has been more shameless in anti-gun ravings, MSNBC or CNN? Tough call…) is certainly worthy of the award:

“The American people will not stand to see hundreds and thousands of their fellow citizens mowed down because the lack of action on the part of the Congress…We have to do something…The time is always right to do what is right. We waited too long. How many more people will die? Would it be a few hundred? A few thousand? Several thousand? We have to act. We cannot wait.”

This should be enshrined in the “Do something!” Hall of Fame. Lewis never hinted at what exactly will end gun deaths, just that Republicans and the NRA are responsible for not doing it. This is pure demagoguery and designed to mislead and inflame his party’s Second Amendment hating base. “We have to act! We cannot wait!” Continue reading →

Assorted Observations On The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck, Las Vegas Strip Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

  • I was serious about directing anyone seeking ethics commentary in reference to the Las Vegas massacre to all of the posts tagged with the Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck tag. So far, there is nothing new being said or proposed, just an unleashing of the same tactics, same fake “facts,” and same rending of garments and tearing of hair, whatever that is. I suppose this is healthy as a cultural release, though not in nay other respect. That tag wasn’t on this basic Ethics Alarms post, however, and it is the starting point for any of my commentary on gun control-related matters. The intentionally stark title: The Inconvenient Truth About The Second Amendment and Freedom: The Deaths Are Worth It.

Oh, hell. I’m just going to re-post it. Be back in a second.

There. It’s up.

  • So much of the blather everywhere is naked virtue signaling. One commenter here who should know better wrote on one of the other posts that I was criticizing those who were decrying gun violence. Who doesn’t decry gun violence? Why is it necessary to proclaim the obvious? Oh, you really are horrified that 59 innocent people were killed and 500 were wounded? What a sensitive person you are! You are so good, I must take your insistence that we have to do something as a substantive contribution to the discussion.

Decrying senseless violence and wanting gut the Bill of Rights in response are not the same thing, not even close. The first is gratuitous and obvious, and the second is emotional and irresponsible.

  • I would not be surprised at all if President Trump further muddled this already incoherent debate by endorsing some new (or old) gun control measures. He would do this, presumably, as he seems to make most decisions, from the gut, or the seat of his pants, or because it seemed like a good idea at the time. The chances that he has thought deeply about the issues involved are nil; the chances that he is familiar with the jurisprudence on the matter is less than nil. It would almost be worth it to watch the reshuffling of loyalties and support among the pundits and commentariat.

Real Nazis, after all, want to confiscate guns.

  • Once again, the NRA is being vilified, with the disgusting “blood on their hands” cry. The NRA isn’t sort of like the ACLU; it’s exactly like the ACLU, but with more integrity. If only the ACLU fought to defend the First Amendment as vigorously as the NRA defends the Second. Organizations that take the extreme position on any of the sections of the Bill of Rights create a necessary counterweight to fanatics who would tear them out of our Constitution and culture.

The NRA is extreme. It has to be extreme. The ACLU isn’t extreme enough, and because it will not take an absolutist stance (Like late SCOTUS justice William O.Douglas, who repeatedly wrote that no restriction on speech was justifiable or Constitutional), it has made itself vulnerable to bias, and harmed its credibility.

  • It is astounding to me—I guess I foolishly expect people to learn—that the eruption on the latest anti-gun fervor is again being led by ignorance, hyperbole and finger-pointing. The argument of  the Federalist essay I posted the link to this morning should be clear as glass: making this a partisan issue guarantees that nothing will get done. Democrats sounding like they are seeking a slippery slope leading to the banning of all firearms guarantees no action whatsoever, dooming even reasonable measures. Forever. Do they really not understand this? Do they really want to try to fix the problem, to the extent it can be fixed? I wonder.

Progressives mostly refuse to read conservative publications like The Federalist. They would rather be pure and stupid than informed and effective.  And this, my friends, is why Donald Trump is on his way to a second term.

  •  The tenor of much of the blather from elected officials and pundits reaffirms my belief that adulthood is a myth.  I keep hearing various versions of the lament, “We can’t let this go on! How can we stop it from happening?”

Continue reading →

Do Good Friends Let Friends Publish Garbage On Social Media? The Duty to Knock Down Irresponsible Opinions

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

“Stop quoting Maxine Waters!”

I just arrived at Virginia Beach Double Tree after a four hour plus drive in the dead of night. This gave amble time to obsess to the point of madness on Facebook post I saw from a friend. This is a smart, educated person; published in fact. Yet the post was (I am paraphrasing):

“I don’t understand Republicans. They must prefer Pence to Trump: why won’t the join Democrats in impeaching the orange bastard? I don’t get it.”

This post garnered many likes in the Facebook echo chamber, and several theories.

Now, this is not just an uninformed opinion. It is a dangerous opinion. It misinforms everyone who reads it and who has reason to trust and respect the writer. It is written in complete ignorance of the Constitution, and an irresponsible misinterpretation of what American democracy is.

I shouldn’t have to explain this further, but what the hell: if the Founders intended for our system to be a modified parliamentary arrangement where the public can try to elect a President but if Congress decides it prefers someone else, like the Vice-President, it can veto the election with a sufficient majority, then Madison, Mason et al. would have made that clear. Instead they made it clear that an elected President can only be impeached upon a guilty verdict in a Senate trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which means unequivocal, serious and substantive wrongdoing, usually criminal. Yet a frightening number of progressives, driven to fantasy by listening to irresponsible and incompetent elected demagogues like Maxine Waters, actually embrace an imaginary version of our government that, if real, would render democracy a cruel fraud. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 10/1/2017: Puerto Rico, Baseball Ethics, And Good Riddance To Hugh Hefner

/ Jack Marshall / 58 Comments

Gooood Morning October!

1 And with October comes the wonderful post-season of that all-American sports that does not leave its athletes with brain disease, that requires some erudition and an attention span longer than a terrier puppy’s to appreciate, and that does not subject its fans to incoherent political theater as part of the price of watching a game. Yes, “it’s baseball, Ray.”

Yesterday the Boston Red Sox finally clinched the America League East title, the first time in over a century that this perverse team has won a championship in consecutive years. In other words, nothing can spoil my mood today.

There are a couple of baseball ethics notes, too:

  • In Miami, Giancarlo Stanton has one last game to hit his 60th home run, which would make him the sixth major league to reach that mark in baseball history. Two of the six, Babe Ruth, whose 60 homers in 1927 stood as the season record for 34 years, and Roger Maris, the Yankee who broke the record with 61 in something of a fluke season, reached the mark fairly. The other three, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds, were steroid cheats. Ever since Stanton caught fire after the All-Star break and looked for a while as if he would exceed 61, wags have been saying that he would become the “real” record holder, since the totals of Mark, Sammy and Barry ( 73, the current record, in 2001) shouldn’t count. Of course they should count. They have to count. The games were official, the runs counted, the homers are reflected in the statistics of the pitchers, the teams, and records of the sport. Bonds should have been suspended before he broke any records, but baseball blew it. Saying his homers (and Sosa’s, and McGwire’s) don’t count is like arguing that Samuel J. Tilden, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were elected President.

Integrity exists in layers, and the ultimate integrity is accepting reality. The 1919 Reds won the World Series, fixed or not. O.J. is innocent in the eyes of the law, and Roger Maris no longer holds baseball single season home run record.

  • In Kansas City, manager Ned Yost did something gracious, generous, and strange. The Royals, a small market team that won two championships with a core of home grown, low-visibility stars, now face losing all or most of them to big free agent contracts that the team simply cannot afford. Fans are often bitter about such venal exits, and teams usually fan the flames of resentment: better that the market be angry at the players than the organization. After Red Sox fan favorite Johnny Damon, a popular symbol of the 2004 World Series winning club, left for greener pastures in the New York Yankees outfield, he was jeered every time he came to bat in Fenway Park for the rest of his career.

But Ned Yost, who will be left with a shell of his team and a new bunch of kids to manage in KC next year, was not going to let the players who made him a winner depart amidst anger and recriminations. During yesterday’s 4-3 victory in front of the home crowd at Kauffman Stadium, Yost engineered an emotional curtain call for all four of the players who were probably playing their last games as Royals.

He pulled them from the game, one by one, all while the team was in the field or the player on the bases, so each could get a long standing ovation: Eric Hosmer in the moments before the fifth inning; Mike Moustakas with one out in the sixth. Lorenzo Cain for a pinch runner. Alcides Escobar in the middle of the seventh.

Nice.

And none of them took a knee on the way out…

2. I have been researching to find any objective reports that support the claim that the federal government and FEMA are not doing their best to help Puerto Rico. There aren’t any. There are plenty of videos of the devastation, but even the New York Times, which is the head cheerleader for anti-Trump porn, has only been able to muster headlines about the relief effort being criticized. All of my Facebook friends writing—it’s really dumb, everybody—about how Trump is uncaring as they signal their virtue by telling us how their hearts go out to the residents of the island literally know nothing about the relief efforts. They don’t know anything about the planning, the logistics, the problems or what is feasible. Nonetheless, they think they have standing to say that it is incompetent, or slow (which means, slower than it has to be), or, and  anyone who says this better not say it to me, based on racism. Their assertions arise out of pure partisan bias, bolstered by convenient ignorance.

Vox’s Matt Yglesias, one of the knee-jerk doctrinaire leftists in the commentary world who does an especially poor job hiding his malady,  attempted to take a shot at the Trump administration by tweeting,

“The US government supplied Berlin for nearly a year by air despite a Soviet blockade using late-1940s technology.”

This is only a valid comparison for the willfully obtuse. You can’t airlift electricity and water, or a communication and transportation infrastructure that is necessary to distribute supplies. Berlin was surrounded, but it had all of these. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 9/26/17: The News Media Hides Sen. Strange’s Corruption, And An NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck Update

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Good Morning, Dallas! Proud of your politically correct football team?

Good Morning!

1 The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream news media, it is a relief to know, unethically and deceptively slants its news reporting in favor of Republicans when even worse Republicans are involved. Since the Ethics Alarms post about the horrible Strange-Moore run-off, I’ve been reading several articles about the issues involved. So far, I have yet to read any that mention the corrupt manner in which Sen. Strange got his seat. They all mention Moore’s problems, like the fact that he’s a theocrat who doesn’t believe in the Rule of Law.

And now your NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck update, because it can’t be avoided, unfortunately…

2. The sports weenies of the year have to be the Dallas Cowboys, who didn’t have either the courage to play it straight and let the silly NFL Anthem Protest Train Wreck miss a stop, or the fortitude to climb right on. On Monday Night Football’s game this week, the Cowboys, owner Jerry Jones, Coach Jason Garrett and other coaches and front office executives kneeled in unison before the anthem, then rose and locked arms as it was being performed. What did it all mean? “Our players wanted to make a statement about unity and we wanted to make a statement about equality,” Jones said at a post game news conference. “They were very much aware that statement, when made or when attempted to be made in and a part of the recognition of our flag, cannot only lead to criticism but also controversy. It was real easy for everybody in our organization to see that the message of unity, the message of equality was getting, if you will, pushed aside or diminished by the controversy. We even had the circumstances that it was being made into a controversy.”

That’s clear as mud, as my dad liked to say.

Here was another theory: Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant told the news media that the decision “was a team thing” that was a direct response to comments and tweets by President Trump over the weekend.

“I feel like that’s the true definition of unity.Trump can’t divide this. I think sports show the perfect example of unity. It’s not just black NFL players, it’s different races. I feel like that was a clear shot at Trump, sitting on that knee like that because you just can’t do that [What Trump said was] super disrespectful. We showed great unity tonight. That’s what that was for. I feel like that was needed. … We’re not going to let a guy like that tear us apart. Not just us but this whole entire league. We’re a prime example of positive people. … He should have never said that. It was a clear punch in the face. I feel like we made up for that.”

Wait, so now this is an anti-Trump protest? What happened to protesting officers getting paid while cop-involved shootings were being investigated—you know, what Colin Kaepernick said?

The Cowboys’ whatever it was was naked, cynical virtue-signalling that ended up being stupidity-signalling. Continue reading →

The NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck, Part Two

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

The overview of our latest Ethics Train Wreck continues from Part One…

  • Slate published an essay by African-American musician John Legend that itself makes an excellent case against the protests while supposedly glorifying them. Never mind the standard anti-Trump spin at the beginning about “Islamophobia” and the rest, though it is nice for any author to state up front that he’s completely biased and his opinion should be discarded as such. Legend and Slate have the audacity to evoke actual protests that were clear and targeted in comparison the all-purpose “knee”:

“Protest is patriotic. Protest has played a critically important role in elevating the voices of the most vulnerable in our nation. Protest in America has been essential to ending war, to demanding equal rights, to ending unfair practices that keep citizens marginalized. If we quell protest in the name of patriotism, we are not patriots. We are tyrants.

Would there have been a Civil Rights Act without the Birmingham protests? When Bull Connor unleashed his fire hoses and dogs on the schoolchildren taking to the streets, racial disparities and the violence facing people because of the color of their skin became the issues of the times. With savage images of the brutal attack in the news every day, President John Kennedy had little choice but to push for a Civil Rights Act that demanded equal services and equal rights.

Protests in Selma, Alabama, changed the trajectory of this nation and catapulted the Voting Rights Act into being.”

A recipe for tapioca would be as germane to the NFL protests as the Selma march. There is no definable law, principle or position these protests bring into focus. Let’s check the Ethics Alarms Protest Ethics Checklist against the NFL grandstanding:

1. Is this protest just and necessary?

No. How is it just? How is it necessary?

2. Is the primary motive for the protest unclear, personal, selfish, too broad or narrow?

Unclear and too broad by definition, since no two protesters make the same argument.

3. Is the means of protest appropriate to the objective?

Obviously not. What does football have to do with “racial justice”?

4. Is there a significant chance that it will achieve an ethical objective or contribute to doing so?

None whatsoever.

5. What will this protest cost, and who will have to pay the bill?

It’s already cost the NFL millions. But nobody is protesting the NFL…

6. Will the individuals or organizations that are the targets of the protest also be the ones who will most powerfully feel its effects?

No.

7. Will innocent people be adversely affected by this action? (If so, how many?)

Sure: every single fan who wants to just watch football.

8. Is there a significant possibility that anyone will be hurt or harmed? (if so, how seriously? How many people?)

The relentless politicizing of sports and entertainment harms U.S. society and frays the fabric of democracy. That means everyone.

9. Are you and your group prepared to take full responsibility for the consequences of the protest?

Clearly not: witness the constant complaining that NFL teams won’t hire Kaepernick so their season is dominated by racial politics rather than, you know, football..

10. Would an objective person feel that the protest is fair, reasonable, and proportional to its goal?

No.

11. What is the likelihood that the protest will be remembered as important, coherent, useful, effective and influential?

My guess: no chance whatsoever, unless unintended consequences count, like getting more votes for President Trump and crippling the NFL count.

12. Could the same resources, energy and time be more productively used toward achieving the same goals, or better ones?

It’s hard to imaging what wouldn’t be a better use of resources, energy and time.

Verdict: It’s an unethical protest. There is nothing patriotic about unethical protests. We have a right to protest; as with free speech, that doesn’t make all examples of exercising that right good, and certainly not “patriotic.”

  • However, let me argue in the alternative, as lawyers often do. Let’s say that, as Legend claims, all protests are patriotic. Fine. Then then Charlottesville protest against tearing down a statue of Robert E. Lee was also patriotic. Why, the, was the President attacked—by Legend and Slate, among others, for not condemning it?

The Left believes that protests are sacrosanct only when they are doing the protesting. There is nothing wrong or unpatriotic about accurately labeling a dumb, badly-conceived or destructive protest, and this one is all three.

“Football was down. The end. We, the good people who read the NYT, must say no to football. What is known cannot become unknown except by willful, immoral forgetting. No decent person can take pleasure in football. No fit parent can allow a child to take up the game. The era of American football is over. Bury it. We can end the misery through the simple and necessary refusal to watch anymore. Say no, America… or hey, wait a minute. Here’s that nasty President of the United States and he’s calling for a boycott of football…

So, watch the liberal media endeavor to save football from bad old President Trump. He’s a racist. This is his racism once again, stirring up the stupid people who voted for him. Here‘s the NYT today:

“The tweet suggested that the president, who used an expletive on Friday night to refer to players who kneel or sit in protest during the anthem — a practice that took hold last season among some African-American players after Colin Kaepernick, the now-former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, did so to protest racial and social injustice — is bent on deepening a bitter culture-war fight with the N.F.L.

It is a highly charged debate, with unmistakable racial undertones, pitting advocates of free speech who argue that professional athletes should have a right to use their positions to call attention to social issues against those who contend that refusing to honor the anthem disrespects the military and the nation, and that sports is no place for such displays.”

 Ann’s line:

“Let the brain damage continue. We’ve got a culture war to fight.”

Continue reading →

The NFL Anthem Protest Ethics Train Wreck, Part One

/ Jack Marshall / 109 Comments

Ah, the post unwritten!  Just three days ago, I was considering a post about the ethics dilemma I face regarding the NFL. On September 21 I read that four  NFL players ( Seattle Seahawks’ Michael Bennett, Philadelphia Eagles’ Malcolm Jenkins, Eagles’ Torrey Smith and former NFL player Anquan Boldin) sent a letter beseeching Commissioner Roger Goodell to make November a month of “social activism,” meaning a month of promoting Black Lives Matters, attacking as police’ and the nation whose public they protect as racist.

“Since 2016, police have shot over 300 men and women in this country. Some of the names and stories are familiar—Jordan Edwards, Trayvon Martin, Alton Sterling, but hundreds of others are not,” the memo says. This is typical of the level of erudition much of the news media, and many voices  on the Left, including President Obama, have been enabling and praising since Colin Kaepernick began his showboating, incoherent  protest against the National Anthem last year. The officer who shot Jordan Edwards was fired and indicted. Trayvon Martin wasn’t shot by police. I can’t imagine how Mike Brown was left off the list, with a reference to “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” Probably a typo.

The next day, we learned that Aaron Hernandez, the Patriots star convicted of murder who hanged himself in prison in April, suffered from a severe case of CTE, “the most severe case” ever seen in a former football player so young.” He was 27. Of course, not a lot of 27 year olds are in a position to have their brains dissected. CTE is the progressive brain disease caused by repeated brain trauma, and there is convincing evidence that the NFL is crippling its players.

My post was going to be about the ethics conflict I face, as one who believes that it is unethical to support the NFL’s profitable mayhem and who also believes that sports should not be made a party to the current progressive indoctrination strategy of making everything in American life a political lecture. The NFL would hasten its own demise, the post would argue, by agreeing to the ridiculous social activism proposal, thus saving brains and lives. Yet this would also exacerbate the divisive and obnoxious trend in the culture wars to politicize aspects of society that should unify us.
What’s a responsible ethicist to do? But it was a busy week, and I thought I could get the piece written over the weekend, which would have been timely if President Trump hadn’t jumped into the issue with both feet. The President ad-libbed an attack on the Kaepernickies during a rally in Alabama, saying,

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump said. “You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it [but] they’ll be the most popular person in this country…But do you know what’s hurting the game more than that? When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they’re playing our great national anthem. The only thing you could do better is if you see it, even if it’s one player, leave the stadium. I guarantee things will stop. Things will stop. Just pick up and leave. Pick up and leave. Not the same game anymore, anyway.”

This immediately turned the National Anthem protest stunt launched by the correctly-unemployed former 49ers quarterback into a late-developing ethics train wreck, and rendered my planned ethics quiz moot. So before anything else stupid happens, let me get down what I hope will be some clarifying observations.Observations:

  • This one is simple, and paramount: Nobody pays to go to sporting events to see continuations of the political disputes and debates they watch sports to avoid. Sports is entertainment, and entertainment is escapism. The same goes for music concerts, movies, plays and musicals. A football player making me watch his half-baked “protest” on the field is no more welcome than the cast of a musical making me sit still to hear its partisan ranting after the show.

Sporting events and other popular entertainment are crucial because they unite society, even if its members disagree passionately on other matters. It is dangerous and unhealthy to remove this crucial oasis of relief from debate, especially now. This should be obvious. It isn’t obvious only to full-time activists who don’t care about the purpose of entertainment or the needs of their audiences. Their objective is to achieve a political agenda by any means possible, regardless of the damage to civil society.

  • A term being used a lot lately on conservative websites is “normals,” describing the Americans who don’t regard politics as the sole focus of their waking hours, and who resent, as the Wall Street Journal termed it, The Politicization Of Everything.

It’s a useful distinction, and there is no question that the President, as misguided and inappropriate as his remarks were,  wins the argument with the many, many millions who just want to watch their favorite teams without being bombarded by political bombast and grandstanding.

  • The NFL could have and should have stopped this train wreck before it left the station by simply re-stating the same standards it had consistently maintained for decades. Players are welcome to have political views and to take part in demonstrations and other activism, but not while wearing their uniforms, and not on the field. Almost exactly a year ago, a player was told by the NFL that he could not wear cleats commemorating 9/11.

Why then did pro football allow Colin Kaepernick to make a far more divisive and incoherent political statement on the field later in the year? The answer is cowardice and abandonment of integrity in the face of race-based politics, the same reason the University of Missouri capitulated to racialist demands by its football team. Most of the players in the NFL are black, so the mostly white leaders of the NFL decided to avoid a confrontation. In doing so, it aligned itself with groups and positions that a large segment of the NFL’s fan base abhors, resulting in lost ratings and revenues. This was a breach of business ethics. The NFL’s business is football, not picking sides in the culture wars.

  • Yesterday, over a hundred NFL players “took a knee” during the National Anthem to protest…something…as the news media cheered them on. This was predictable, and the big question is whether the President prompted the reaction intentionally. I am certain he did not; we know by now that Trump  just blurts stuff out without considering consequences of any kind. The US doesn’t need any more division now, and Trump’s crude outburst was indefensible. Presidents should not comment negatively on the conduct of citizens when they are acting within their Constitutional rights. Nor should they interfere with the policies and disciplinary decisions of private businesses, which he did, and which President Obama also did when he endorsed and defended Kaepernick’s stunt last year.

Both were equally inappropriate and unethical, and abuses of power, influence and position. Of course, Obama’s statement was more dignified and articulate than Trump’s—whose wouldn’t be?—and everything Obama did was greeted with swooning and cheers from the media, while anything this President does is presumed to be an abomination.  They were still two sides of the same unethical coin. Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 9/15/17: Lafayette, Harvard, Manning, And “Shut Up And Give Us The Score!” [Updated]

/ Jack Marshall / 70 Comments

Good Morning!

1 Commenter Other Bill had to ruin my evening by posting this defense of Jamele Hill from a Sports Illustrated writer, which would be enough for me to cancel my subscription if I had one.

“I was going to give this a pass. Truly, I was. Jamele Hill, the gifted young woman who co-hosts ESPN’s The Six every night with my old Morrissey Boulevard running buddy Michael Smith, got on her electric Twitter machine and tweeted out her unremarkable—and damned near irrefutable—opinion that the current president of the United States is a racist and a white supremacist. This drew the usual screams from the political flying monkeys of the American Right. ESPN responded with a craven corporate response that I’ll get to in a minute, but let me just say right now that you will not believe that the response was written by anyone who ever came within a light-year of any newsgathering operation. OK, so I thought that was pretty much it. I agreed with everything Hill tweeted. I thought what she said should be obvious to everyone in America at this point. She delivered her opinion. There was the customary cyber-bullying pushback, and we all move on.”

This is a perfect example of why sports writers should be seen and not read or listened to on non-sports topics. Let’s see:

a) The fact that she is “gifted”—a matter of opinion: a smart ESPN broadcaster wouldn’t do something this stupid—is irrelevant to the controversy. So a bad sports journalist  would be less justified in attacking the President like this?

b) A journalist calling the President of the United States a racist is in fact quite remarkable, and if an ESPN employee had called Barack Obama equivalent things, he or she would have been fired so fast her hair would have combusted.

c) OK, asshole, give me your closing argument about how President Trump is irrefutably a white supremacist. You can’t use the fact that he believes in enforcing immigration laws, or the fact that white supremacists tend to support him, when his political opponents are addicted to saying and writing things like “the whole white race is a virus.” You can’t use the fact that he doesn’t believe that tearing down statues of Civil War heroes is smart or valid, because I agree with him, and I am not a white supremacist. The fact that he implicitly defended the right of white nationalists to exercise their First Amendment rights makes him a supporter of the Constitution, as his oath of office requires, and not a nascent totalitarian like the hate-speech banning politicians you probably support.

So what have you got? I’d say nothing. It’s “irrefutable” to you because your left-wing friends say it is….

d) …not that whether Hill was right or not is the least bit relevant to whether ESPN is sending the message that gratuitous public anti-Trump, race-baiting grandstanding from employees is acceptable, but anti-Democrat/Muslim/Trans statements are not. It is sending that message, and that’s a double standard and obvious bias.

e) ESPN’s response was craven all right, but for the opposite reason that this guy says.

f) The fact that mostly conservatives correctly condemn Hill and ESPN only proves that the Left has lost its ethics alarms and professional compass, or broken them while stomping and screaming during their post 2016 election tantrum. It’s not a partisan or political verdict, except that “the resistance” would defend the Zodiac killer if he attacked the President. That’s their flaw, not ours.

2. Today’s “I was going to post on it but the story is so stupid that I don’t want to give it the prominence” note is this one.  Continue reading →